QUEEN ELIZABETHS PERQUISITE 227 



from the railway where it crosses the Lea, or off Kew 

 Gardens, to give three casual examples. You may 

 catch sight of the spread wings high over the flats 

 beside Battersea Park, and scores of swimming swans 

 are a standard spectacle for those who venture in a 

 steamer to the Kyles of Bute. But a thousand and more 

 swans and nests by the hundred these make a wonder 

 of the world. We must think first of swans when we 

 think of Abbotsbury. The association of ideas is over 

 whelming. 



Nevertheless Abbotsbury would be the peer of the 

 greater sanctuaries if there were no swans and no zostera 

 to justify the use of their long necks. As plentiful grass 

 just the right distance below the surface gives the swans 

 their optimum of conditions, as the men of science say, 

 so do other virtues inevitably draw other species of bird 

 and even certain species of plant. The secret of the 

 place is the fine gradation of fresh water into salt, as the 

 birds know well. The sea is kept at bay by one of the 

 most curious and immense shingle banks in the world. 

 At Scolt Head, and many such a place, for example the 

 plain that once was Rye Harbour, the shingle, often 

 made of rubbed flints, serves as mere vertebrae for the 

 sand and the psamma grass or the sea holly, or even 

 the viper s bugloss, to colonise. This immense bank is 

 like the cliff, rocky, a solid barrier with a mobile glacis, 

 sorted into a mosaic pattern by tide and wind. It is 

 too solid to be breached and torn, like a great bank at 

 Newgall Sands, in Pembrokeshire, by the furies of any 

 tempest and the weight of any sea. This splendid defence 

 guards a great lagoon at Abbotsbury ; and you must go 

 to the barrier for preference in late June to see one of 

 the distinctions of the region. The terns, the sea-swal 

 lows nest there, separated from the swans as the stone 



